urxvt*font:xft:DejaVu Sans Mono: size=14urxvt*background: blackurxvt*foreground: whiteurxvt*scrollBar: false <----- note the capital "B"!Xft*antialias: trueXft*hinting: trueXft*hintstyle: hintfull Many more options but I won't go any further. I didn't want to load up on things like lxterminal or xfce-4 terminal and think I found my home with urxvt.

Sorry to seem like I'm blogging - I was just banging my head against the wall trying to keep things ultra-light yet still looking good for my eyes on a variety of hardware. TC is now here to stay with me for a loooong time!

I'm currently testing some patches to rxvt from ArchLinux for font rendering. Along with an updated DejaVu Mono fonts it looks a lot better than the unifont, and appears to have the same languages supported. Unifont 10 is on the left, DejaVu is on the right. You'll need to look at the image full size to see the difference.

Although it is still a bitmapped font, have you tried xos4 / Terminus with either rxvt or aterm using the iso-10646 sets?

I just compiled the latest Terminus fontset for X11, and got it up and running nicely in my RPi's running piCore with Aterm. WOW, what a difference.

Although not a scaleable font, Terminus is rocking my world as a lightweight precursor to going all out with TTF font environments or rxvt - at least for my terminal needs for now. Maybe later I'll try the console fonts, but for X11 with terminals, Terminus shines.

i tried a lot and my favorite look is still strongly hinted windows fonts. fine both with or without subpixels to me (depends on the specific font and it's shape/size/boldness which one I prefer)

Since the freetype autohinter on linux has a reputation of destroying all the goodness in these quality fonts i wasted a lot of time during the last 10 years or so, regularly recompiling freetype manually to get the bytecode hinter enabled, that used to be disabled by default. and of course it still never worked 100% correctly - i think the freetype people didn't understand how you have to adjust gamma for the subpixels. it depends on color perception.

Recently they stopped trying to badly copy windows and switched to imitating mac os, making everything anti-aliased, normally resulting in horrible quality on normal low-dpi displays even when using high quality hinted fonts. This helps a lot with...

...BAD quality fonts. Any added randomness actually makes them look less themselves, and thus better. Some people use only strongly antialiased fonts with such bad quality hinting that the autohinter and strong antialiasing is the only good way of dealing with them.One common example: most webfonts, normally selected by aspiring web designers at 72 point, then scaled down by another guy to make it readable (losing all the "beauty"), and scaled up again by the font artist, very slightly, just beyond being still readable, so that you can see enough detail of the artwork.

At the same time with this change the freetype people limited your choice about the older rendering while claiming the opposite (they say they increased the choice). I don't know if they did it on purpose or just didn't know better, they claim at least that they found the final perfect solution and all that, and that everything would be configureable and legacy behavior still supported, but that's a lie. They even combined their misunderstandings of font technology with a corporate-style marketing effort, trying to convince all IT hipsters how they have perfected fonts once and for all.

A lot of people I know are happy with it regardless. Fun-fact: they all have very high dpi displays and spend most of their day web browsing (obviously with those shitty web fonts). It's too hard to install microsoft fonts anyway, so I can see how they never realized they now look really bad.

As much as people rant about microsoft, they did this one thing right: they really know how to display text on our (still) limited resolution.

Well... I have to admit I'll leave my major font management up to my media consumption boxes.

With the proper bitmapped font (Terminus), things have kind of changed for me as far as terminals go. I can deal with Aterm now. In fact I always liked xterm's mini-menu (ctrl-right click) and kind of miss that with Aterm and rxvt.

From a small and simple standpoint, Terminus and TC has proven to be a really workable setup for me. Not only Aterm, but the DILLO browser too!

Dillo: after installing Terminus, I pointed my bitmapped fonts to "terminus", instead of the ugly Helvetica or whatever it decides to choose and forced it to use Terminus for all fonts. Tweak your minimum font size, and I'm in heaven now. I could go with the fltk-full and a boatload of ttf fonts, but for me, now there is no need to do that and I can stick with the standard, um, TC / Picore out of the box setup.

So without having to tweak all the TTF , xft , antialias options etc etc, the Terminus font is good enough for what I use TC for, which isn't mass media consumption generally. Clean, readable for hours on end just like they pitched it. Heh, sure all pages in Dillo have that terminus-font look, but it is soooo much cleaner and easier to read.

I'm in love with Terminus now. Thing is, in '95 I didn't know squat about how to change fonts. Because of TC's prompting, now I know how! Too bad it only took me 23 years to figure it out.

UPDATE: Yes! All my fltk/flwm dialogs have things working with the terminus fonts like file previews etc and are soo much nicer. Man, it was worth the effort. My RPI-zero w is like a new machine.

I like it - I'll do a writeup on how I got it to work well in regards to TC/piCore in another subforum - keeping an eye out not to be blogging. The desire is not to turn back the clock, but to make the most out of a tiny resource, regardless of how old/new the hardware is....